Real quick, real time – Let’s meet online!

Conventional vs contemporary will always be a hot topic for debate. Some say doing what the age old traditions ask you to is a wise thing while some believe that shunning the past and embracing new age practices can be more fruitful. But, when it comes to business meetings, there are no two confusing viewpoints- just one ideal way.

So, what does it take to break a deal that could be the turning point for you? To test the waters and find out if we’ll make for great partners?

A smart meeting.

Gauging the expectations, resources and capabilities that both the parties have, beforehand, can really help deliver out of the box projects.

But, as weird as it may sound, we resist from advocating face to face meetings that most of us are obsessed about. We mean we know that Indian businesses are known for their dedicated and fine work practices and when two Indian entities get together, great things can be done. But today, we’d like to pass rather uncomfortable remarks on the ‘face to face meetings’ that form an integral part of these work practices.

After all, when the entire world is looking for new technological innovations to progress by leaps and bounds; why are we still stuck at square one? Is it any good? Today, we’d like to tell you why it’s much smarter to have online meetings and our arguments are the raison d’etre for this blog.

Over the period of time, we have dealt with both Indian and foreign companies. There are many clear cut factors that help in differentiating the experiences while dealing with the two. Pay scale is one thing, but a more important feature is interaction or communication. Interaction with our overseas clients happen through digital mediums, and unlike the conventional notions that our Indian clients have, these e-meetings are smarter and save up on resources like time and money, which can be then directed to other important aspects like planning and research.

Sometimes, it’s funny to see how obsessed with meetings we are. We have seen businesses assure us about ‘no budget constraint’ just to fix a meeting. It’s only in the latter stages that it becomes clear that they don’t even have funds which would come remotely close to the project requirements. The serious clients, too, press for the same and don’t mind calling every company they can find on Google.

So, what is the reason for this trust deficit? Isn’t it discouraging native companies like us from taking up Indian businesses? Isn’t it luring us into giving more prominence to the foreign ones? Of course, we don’t want to take up those biases, but when it comes to business, profits do stimulate inclinations.

At WebReinvent, we are in this habit of researching and analyzing client behavioural pattern at regular intervals. It doesn’t only help us in understanding the market trends and practices, but, also helps in forming policies and approaches that aims at boosting our symbiotic relationship with clients by putting them at pedestal. Working on the same lines, we tried to look into the matter closely and found out that there are three prime factors which drive our obsession of face to face meetings:

1. Physical interaction boosts trust-

Yes, most of us think that meeting face to face is a great way to boost trust and credibility. But then none of the scammers and conmen come with character certificates tagged on their heads which will say, “Great you decided to meet this person. You so should not do business with him. Thanks!”

2. Appearances help making judgements-

We are a judgemental lot, trust us. For many of the clients, our appearance and especially faces help in making judgements and a background opinion. Sometimes that’s the only reason they would want to meet you. Honestly, would you rather want a bunch of super handsome, suit clad idiots working for you? And what happened to the “Don’t judge a book by its cover” idiom we have been learning since childhood?

3. Convenience of explanation-

It’s a lot easier to explain face to face for many of them. They think it’s much better than the digital alternatives, say Skype. But, in reality these would be the ones who have never used Skype! And to add to that, is the baggage of ego top notch people like CEOs and directors carry. For them, anything less than a face to face meeting is disrespectful.

So how do we deal with it exactly? One solution could be to overlook all these progressive logics and give in to the demands of our Indian work culture. Another one, however, calls for the revolution of a sort. A revolution of ideologies, attitude and our whole outlook towards work.

And it’s not just about making things easier for us as a service provider. It’s also about catching up with global trends. Businesses simply cannot afford to throb in their own shell of convenience when the world outside is bursting every now and then with smart innovations. The competition is getting tougher, business strategies more clever and the entire work flow more sophisticated. How can we ignore the changes the world is embracing then? Technology is at our aid and gives us a plethora of options to resort to, to solve this face to face meeting obsession. We can use tools/ technologies like:

It’s a rather difficult approach to put our doubts and age old habits to rest, but then, who said that the path to glory is easy? To be able to savour the fruit of success, you need to rise up against the convenient odds and embrace the challenges.

About The Company

We are a gang of innovators out to take over the digital world. Instead of using machine guns and laser beams we use weapons like PHP, MySQL, HTML5, WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc to make killer web designs and developments that are meant to knock out our competitors and establish a new wave of innovation on the web.